Current Events

If you want a latte and find yourself in the Sacramento area, there might be a more God-honoring option than Starbucks: Origin Coffee and Tea.
Founded by Origin Community Church, it serves all the mochas, cappuccinos, and loose leaf teas one would expect at a trendy coffee shop. But unlike most of its competitors, Origin, a 501(c)(3), donates its profits to combat human trafficking—which includes anything from foreign children being shipped around the world for prostitution to American pimps luring underprivileged teens into selling their bodies.
As Origin’s website explains:

2-4 million young girls every day are enslaved, raped, dehumanized for pleasure. This is the nightmarish reality which is shocking to us, having triumphed over legalized slavery in the U.S. But the dark and hidden practice of human sex trafficking not only exists, it is thriving. This thief of childhood innocence is now the third largest and fastest growing criminal industry in the world. At Origin Coffee & Tea, we simply can’t go another day without waking up to the cries of these girls for rescue. We must fight for them as they cannot fight for themselves. This is not just another cause—this is an emergency.

To help the cause, almost all employees at the coffee shop work for free. That includes about 100 volunteers at a time, with each committing to work four hours a week for three months. And they are expected to discuss trafficking with customers when opportunity arises.
This ministry calls to mind the rich Christian heritage of helping the vulnerable. In the early fourth century, for example, the plague hit the Roman city of Caesarea and sent the population to flight. Yet Christians stayed behind to care for the dying and later bury them, risking their own lives in the process. According to the historian Eusebius, the Christians’ “deeds were on everyone’s lips, and they glorified the God of the Christians. Such actions convinced them that they alone were pious and truly reverent to God.” Later, in the nineteenth century, Christian conviction motivated England’s Earl of Shaftesbury to crusade on behalf of the mentally ill. For centuries cages, chains, prisons, floggings, darkness, and semi-starvation had been accepted as legitimate forms of “treatment.” In fact, the mentally ill were all believed to be controlled by evil spirits that could only be exorcised through such torture. But thanks to Shaftesbury, Britain’s insane eventually came to be regarded as patients rather than prisoners. The list could continue, for followers of Jesus were responsible for hospitals, orphanages, soup kitchens, and host of other merciful endeavors.
More importantly though, Origin Coffee and Tea calls to mind the words of Jesus in Matthew 25:40, “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.” Indeed, the Lord expects His followers to devote their time and resources to helping forgotten and preyed upon members of society.
May this congregation in California inspire others to likewise find creative means to help the weak and vulnerable.

Eighty-four percent of unmarried Americans between the ages of 18 and 23 have already had sex according to a newly released, massive study, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marriage (Oxford, 2011) by Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker. Regnerus is a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, and the author of Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2007). Uecker is a post-doc with the Carolina Population Center at UNC-Chapel Hill. Together they have collated a monumental amount of data from numerous sources to describe the sexual values of young adults in the United States.
Some will be shocked to read that,

Only 4 percent of all 18-23-year-old women are currently in a romantic relationship but not sexually involved with the person whom they are seeing.

To turn it around, 96 percent of 18-23-year-old women in a romantic relationship are also sexually involved with the person whom they are seeing! That’s simply stunning.
While turning 18 used to be the marker of adulthood, when children moved out of their parents’ house and started living “on their own,” today fewer young people than ever consider themselves adults at 18. Regnerus and Uecker observe:

When we ask our introductory sociology class—comprised largely of college freshmen and sophomores—how many of them think of themselves as adults, seldom do more than 10 percent of them raise their hands. These are America’s emerging adults: accelerating in sexual desire and interest and at the cusp of their peak fertility and virility, yet slowing down to meet growing educational expectations, pursue expanding career pathways, and savor the joys of friends and self-actualization.

Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules. Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They have been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cell phones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of “friends.” That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.

The bottom line is that, by their own profession, adolescents are having grown-up sex. And, like all adolescents, they somehow expect not to have to face the negative consequences.
What all of this means of course is that by the time these young adults reach their 30s they are more likely than not to be sexually, emotionally, and relationally wounded. Someone will have to help them pick up the pieces of their broken lives.
It is not for the sake of prudery that—following the biblical pattern—previous generations have maintained that sex, marriage, and procreation were indissoluably linked, even if they didn’t always obey the pattern themselves. The Bible’s aim is to glorify God and to prescribe relationships and institutions in which humans can flourish. Marriage is one of those institutions. As Christopher Ash has so remarkably put it in the title of his book, marriage is sex in service to God.
Sex should be reserved for those who are mature enough to take on the responsibility that comes with it, namely, marriage and openness to nurturing children. Following this script would either mean postponing sexual activity or having to grow up.Premarital Sex in America is not all bad news, however. Regnerus and Uecker do offer a profile of young adults who are still virgins, even declaring: “we want to clarify that plenty of young adults are still virgins, and these shouldn’t be thought of as abnormal or sexually stunted. They are, nevertheless, not the norm.”
What the virgins have in common:

They’re in college, especially four-year degree programs, or else are college graduates.

They’re more religious, especially in terms of how central it is to their identity.

They’re not prone to getting drunk.

They don’t consider themselves popular.

A few characteristics of emerging-adult virgins are gender specific:

Asian men are more likely than white men to be virgins.

Regular churchgoing is more a hallmark of virginity in men than it is in women.

Politically conservative women, by party or self-identity, are more likely to be virgins.

The book ends by helpfully exploding ten myths about sex in what the authors describe as “emerging adulthood.”

First, long-term exclusivity is a fiction.

Second, the introduction of sex is necessary in order to sustain a fledging or struggling relationship.

Third, the sexual double standard is inherently wrong and must be resisted by any means.

Fourth, boys will be boys. That is, men can’t be expected to abide by the sexual terms that women may wish to set.

Fifth, it doesn’t matter what other people do sexually; you make your own decisions.

A new study on church attendance drew a conclusion that may surprise some: in America, college graduates are more likely to attend church than those with only a high school education.
While 46 percent of college-educated whites attend worship services at least monthly, only 37 percent of moderately educated whites—those with a high school diploma but no four-year college degree—do the same, according to research presented this month at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.
So what’s a Christian to think about this?
On the one hand, it flies in the face of the oft repeated myth that Christianity is merely a crutch for the weak-minded. Perhaps many educated Americans realize that Jesus of Nazareth founded a faith of enlightenment and that the Christian worldview stands up under the closest intellectual scrutiny.
Indeed, in recent years the Intelligent Design movement has helped demonstrate the absurdity of Darwinian atheism; cultural decline in the West has revealed the destructive nature of abandoning Christian morality; and apologists have mounted powerful defenses of biblical truth. Perhaps college-educated Americans are more aware of these developments than their less educated counterparts and consequently attend church.
Yet a closer look at the study suggests that there may also be cause for alarm. Researchers theorized that college-educated people attend church more often because churches tend to promote traditional middle-class values, including marriage and strong work ethic. So far, so good.
But that causes me to wonder: do the educated also feel comfortable in church because some congregations reinforce the sinful materialism that too often characterizes the middle class? Consider the state of many churches. They boast sermon series on how to succeed in business, sponsor financial seminars that focus more on building one’s portfolio than building God’s kingdom, and have lobbies that look like the latest malls complete with coffee houses, stores, and indoor fountains. While successful businesses, strong portfolios, and malls are not evil in themselves, the collective reality of these developments in church suggests that the people of God have imbibed the world’s attitude toward possessions.
If that’s what is alluring educated, middle class Americans to church, God is not pleased. Consider His warning in 1 Timothy 6:10: “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils. It is through this craving that some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pangs.”
In the New Testament, the norm was for churches to be populated by those who were unimpressive and non-influential by worldly standards, for the values of the world’s elite conflicted with those of Christ. That’s why Paul wrote to the Corinthians: “[N]ot many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth” (1 Corinthians 1:26).
Of course, the wealthy and influential are welcome among God’s people, and thankfully many have followed Him, including Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and David. Yet if the church is drawing the educated by catering to materialism, this latest study is not good news after all.

When the spirit of the age is to strive for self-gratification, rather than what is excellent, it is no surprise then that the education of our children takes on a similar impulse. From the Kairos Journal vault is an important reflection on this predicament:
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When a Missouri, fifth-grade teacher mentioned the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a student asked, “Was she hurt?” When the average American high school student is asked what made Andrew Carnegie famous or what Pilgrim’s Progress is about, there is only puzzlement. There seems to be real slippage from the day when McGuffey’s Readersintroduced elementary school kids to Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Shakespeare. And these McGuffey students were not the elites; from 1836 to 1920, 122 million Readers were in circulation, second only to the Bible.
In those days, school years were capped by “spring exhibitions,” with popular spelling competitions involving such words as “‘argillaceous’ (of the nature of clay) . . . and ‘acephalous’ (without a head).” In Kansas, to finish the eighth grade, students had to pass a test, spelling words such as “elucidation” and “animosity.” Today, the teachers are more open to “inventive spelling,” more concerned that a student “writes with confidence” than that he spells correctly.
Alarm hit the boiling point in 1983, when the Reagan administration released an assessment of American public education, A Nation at Risk: “If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.” The grim findings were soon seconded by What Do Our 17-Year-Olds Know? by Diane Ravitch and Chester Finn, Cultural Literacy by E. D. Hirsch, The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, andTo Reclaim a Legacy by William Bennett.
The educational establishment dismissed the critics, comparing them to Chicken Little, who, when hit by a falling acorn, ran around, yelling, “The sky is falling.” By their account, the minor problems could not be blamed on teachers and administrators but upon the schools’ social context, a lack of funding, and misleading national standardized tests. Their answer was a greater leveling of income that will give the students a more optimistic viewpoint on life, protecting teachers from “religious bigots,” peer-tutoring, erasure of “meritocratic individualism,” and above all, rejection of the “traditional view . . . that schools are mechanisms for pumping bits of knowledge from the past into passive students.” So much for such bits of knowledge as that the expression “Vanity Fair” came fromPilgrim’s Progress, that a comma separates independent clauses, and that the sum of a triangle’s angles is 180˚.
Those who say the educational crisis is “manufactured” receive highest honors from the teachers’ union, the National Educational Association (NEA). But many Americans are dissatisfied with the teachers’ giving themselves A’s. They complain that the language of curriculum has moved from “rigor” and “homework” to “diversity” and “self-esteem”; that the grade D has been replaced by the grade “emerging”; that the multiple-intelligences movement has placed bodily-kinesthetic intelligence on a par with logical-mathematic intelligence in the schools; that national tests such as the SAT have been “recentered” to accommodate and normalize slipping scores; that automatic F’s for grievous grammatical errors are now unthinkable affronts to students’ sensitivities and creativity.
Humorist Garrison Keillor spins yarns about a fictional town called Lake Wobegon, where all the kids are above average, but the American education establishment does not get the joke. Neither do they find the expression “mass excellence” odd. They seem to have replaced the Bible’s command to concentrate on true, honorable, just, pure, lovely, commendable, and excellent things (Philippians 4:8) with obsession over that which is self-gratifying, self-accommodating, self-justifying, and self-expressing, no matter how lame the self in question might be. Old McGuffey would have never stood for this—and neither should contemporary America.

Joel Marks, professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of New Haven and a scholar at the Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics at Yale University, recounts his loss of faith in a recent New York Times article. Don’t misunderstand, he’s always been an atheist, but now he’s lost his faith in morality.

I had thought I was a secularist because I conceived of right and wrong as standing on their own two feet, without prop or crutch from God. We should do the right thing because it is the right thing to do, period. But this was a God too. It was the Godless God of secular morality, which commanded without commander – whose ways were thus even more mysterious than the God I did not believe in, who at least had the intelligible motive of rewarding us for doing what He wanted.

The honest atheist makes the point that so many Christian apologists have been making for so long, that atheism has no grounds for moral absolutes. And Marks seems to be okay with that. Since he doesn’t want an authoritative God over him, why in the world would he want such claustrophobic morals?
But there’s a dark side to Marks’ conclusion and he’s not quick to hide it:

[I]f there was one thing I knew in this entire universe, it was that some things are morally wrong. It is wrong to toss male chicks, alive and conscious, into a meat grinder, as happens in the egg industry. It is wrong to scorn homosexuals and deny them civil rights. It is wrong to massacre people in death camps.

But suddenly I knew it no more. I was not merely skeptical or agnostic about it; I had come to believe, and do still, that these things are not wrong (emphasis mine).

While Dr. Marks plays intellectual dodgeball in the halls of New Haven, we can only hope that he, and others like him, continue to brake for small children who run into the street. But this doesn’t keep Marks from persuading others towards his desires:

My outlook has therefore become more practical: I desire to influence the world in such a way that my desires have a greater likelihood of being realized.

Yikes! It’s very convenient that Marks uses Mother Teresa as an example of one influencing the world toward her desires, but with no moral foundations, Hitler and Pol Pot become a more likely consequence.
But the rest of the world can’t live this way and, I’m assuming, neither can Marks. For throughout his essay, he still uses words like “victim” and “perpetrators.” Without assuming some sort of moral framework, these words are meaningless and empty, yet he uses them with much conviction.
As Christians we know that the presence and authority of God is everywhere, even on the lips of atheists (Ps. 139:7). And most certainly there is evil. We see it played out on our TV’s, in the newspaper, and in our own hearts. And we know it’s a most hideous and costly evil, one that would cost God his only Son to make right.

This week’s New York Times Magazine’s lead story, “The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy,” was about yet another tragedy of our culture of reproductive control. “For all its successes,” the article points out, “reproductive medicine has produced a paradox: in creating life where none seemed possible, doctors often generate more fetuses than they intend.” In this case, 45 year-old Jenny was pregnant with twins through the use of in vitro fertilization (IVF). Sadly, controlling when and how she got pregnant provided license to abort one of the twins:

If I had conceived these twins naturally, I wouldn’t have reduced this pregnancy, because you feel like if there’s a natural order, then you don’t want to disturb it. But we created this child in such an artificial manner — in a test tube, choosing an egg donor, having the embryo placed in me — and somehow, making a decision about how many to carry seemed to be just another choice. The pregnancy was all so consumerish to begin with, and this became yet another thing we could control.

Aborting one twin over another is not rare in the U.S. As the article points out:

No agency tracks how many reductions occur in the United States, but those who offer the procedure report that demand for reduction to a singleton, while still fairly rare, is rising. Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York, one of the largest providers of the procedure, reported that by 1997, 15 percent of reductions were to a singleton. Last year, by comparison, 61 of the center’s 101 reductions were to a singleton, and 38 of those pregnancies started as twins.

God makes every human being in his image, after his likeness. And he did give us authority to tend and care for the natural world (Genesis 1:26-27). But when we ignore the sanctity of human life and usurp his authority, people often die.
C. S. Lewis understood the temptations of our power over the natural order, including human reproduction. In The Abolition of Man, he famously said:

What we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument.